SPECIAL EVENT: Craig Hogan, Director of the Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics, will deliver the 2012 Lighter-Sams Lecture on April 15, 2012. Information about parking is available here: Parking Information.


A Message from Prof. Fredrick Olness
Chair of the SMU Physics Department

Photo of Fred Olness, Department Chair

This has been another very exciting year for our department. Our faculty have returned to campus from across the globe for the Fall semester and we have much to report.

As part of our Undergraduate Research Program, two students used robotic telescope data to discover 17 new variable stars, and they have published their findings in the Journal of Undergraduate Research in Physics ( Learn More . . .).

Professor Stroynowski is spending a year in Geneva Switzerland at the CERN lab working on the ATLAS detector of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Already the LHC is observing phenomena that cannot be readily explained within the conventional "Standard Model." There are also many experimental physicists working with Stroynowski at CERN (Hadavand, Hoffman, Firan, Daya, Ishmukhametov, Rios and others), all of whom are putting their effort into data collection and analysis in an international race to make new discoveries. They have contributed already to several CERN papers published this year.

The SMU Opto-electronics lab set a world record for a Application-Specific-Integrated-Circuit (ASIC) designed for high speed data transmission in particle physics experiments. Professor Ye supervises this effort.

Professor Nadolsky received an Early Career Research Award (ECRA) from the US Department of Energy; he was one of 5 particle theorists nationwide who received this award which recognizes his excellence in studies of fundamental interactions.

For more highlights and details, please see our Fall 2010 Physics Department Highlights. We look forward to equally exciting news and developments this semester!

Fredrick Olness
Department Chair